The collected works of Lana Brindley: writer, speaker, blogger

OpenStack Contributions

Like most people I learn best by doing, so one of the first tasks I set myself when I started working on OpenStack documentation was to get a docs patch in as quickly as possible. In the end, this turned out to be a copyedit on the introduction to the High Availability guide, and it happened on day two, right before I did my induction in Sydney on day three. I had no idea this was a big deal until I got to the Sydney office to find myself being lauded, which was somewhat amusing, and slightly embarrassing.

So the main upside of this is that I am now officially an OpenStack ATC (active technical contributor). The next step from here is to keep making patches of course, along with code reviews and the like and hopefully to continue being useful to the community in this way.

One of the more important things about coming to a new project is working out the workflows. All the formal stuff is documented, of course, but sometimes it’s the common knowledge things that are hardest to pick up; the bits that ‘everyone knows’. I’m still feeling a little daunted by code reviews (what exactly constitutes an acceptable patch? To what extent should I be testing the proposed content?), but after discussions with the core docs contributors I’m starting to get a handle on those. This week has been spent largely as a sponge: just trying to soak everything up. After a day or two off over the weekend, hopefully my brain has made sense of most of the things I’ve learned so far, and next week will be a week of action!

Where the bloody hell are ya?!

Who wrote all this stuff?

All writing on this blog is the work of Lana Brindley and does not necessarily reflect the view of Rackspace, OpenStack, or any other group with which I am affiliated, except where I have used direct quotes (which are attributed to the original authors where possible). All images were either taken by me, shared under their individual licencing requirements, or obtained as stock photography.